


WWACOF Extras

by hobbitdragon



Series: WWACOF Series and Extras [1]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Reunions, Telepathic Bond, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:34:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24012178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hobbitdragon/pseuds/hobbitdragon
Summary: Stories and scenes from the What Witchers Are Capable of Feeling 'verse. This will continue to be marked as complete with every chapter I post, since the story itself is already completed.
Relationships: Dettlaff van der Eretein/Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy
Series: WWACOF Series and Extras [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1640068
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47





	WWACOF Extras

Regis waited. He paced around the little borrowed room in which Dettlaff had been staying and did his best to neaten his hair and clothes. He brushed off lint, rubbed at a few stains, made a mental note to find his needle and thread and mend another tear that had developed recently in his tunic. 

He tried not to imagine Dettlaff running away again. He tried not to imagine how Dettlaff might arrive in the street, smell him and the Witchers, and leave without ever entering. He tried not to imagine days passing without Dettlaff ever having returned, of finally having to slink back to Corvo Bianco or the cemetery alone. 

As Regis had done so often for the last four months, he tried to pull on their bond, their shared blood. But Dettlaff remained as inaccessible as ever. A closed door through which Regis could only see flashes through the keyhole. 

_When_ Dettlaff returned, not _if,_ Regis thought to himself, trying to be hopeful-- _when_ Dettlaff returned, it would be good that Eskel had come here. Dettlaff was so distraught by his circumstances that Regis himself was clearly not enough to tempt Dettlaff back into the company of others. But perhaps the scent of his new mate would. 

The floorboards downstairs creaked. 

“I know you’re there,” Dettlaff said quietly from below. 

Regis closed his eyes, trying to control the flood of mixed gratitude and anxiety that ran through him. His hands curled into fists. He wanted to grasp and not let go. He wished to grow his claws and dig them into Dettlaff’s flesh so they could never be parted again. 

“Yes, I’m here,” Regis said to the empty air. “I did something very foolish and painful to myself in order to find you, so you’d better stop running. Next time I may decide to do something even worse.”

With a soft _whump_ Dettlaff manifested across the room. 

“You should not have come!” Dettlaff growled, marching forward all full of anger and decisiveness. “You were meant to be safe at home with the others, with the little ones, far away from--”

“No!” Regis interrupted. “We are _as one_ now! As I deserve, so shall you! You cannot give to me what you will not also accept!”

“Not anymore,” Dettlaff hissed. His claws grew and the sclera of his eyes darkened. “I _fail_ those I love. People take them and hurt them. Leaving you behind was the only thing I could do to keep you safe!”

Regis settled his weight a little more evenly, regarding Dettlaff with a sharp pang of tenderness. He had missed that face, no matter how human it sometimes looked. 

“I am not an egg to be left behind in a nest, my heart, and I am not human. I am powerful just as you are,” Regis told him. “I read the blackmail letter and the notes describing what you had to do to the knights--”

“And now you have come to give them _two_ vampires to abuse!” Dettlaff shouted, teeth lengthening and nose flattening. He was losing control of himself already, so cornered and trapped and miserable for so long that all he’d learned was fading away. “Leave, now! At once! I don’t know who might be watching this house, I don’t know if they might see. They’ll find out you’re here and they’ll hurt you too!

“They have _already_ hurt me!” Regis snarled back at him, and at this, Dettlaff’s fury collapsed into miserable horror. His shoulders slumped and his eyes went huge. “They just don’t know it. They cannot take _you_ from me without hurting me. _This_ hurts me, do you understand?” Regis gestured between them. “This distance, the way you have closed yourself to me.”

“I cannot--I do not deserve--” Dettlaff started to say, and Regis felt the echo of that shame and terror through his whole body. Not through their connection, but from his experience at Tesham Mutna. Yesterday’s memories still made him sick to think about. 

But Geralt had been right. Dettlaff had let his shame and fear isolate him, and Regis could not allow himself to fall into the same cycle. To allow it in himself would allow it in Dettlaff too. 

Regis stepped in close. 

“It is beautiful that you believe in the rightness of things, my heart, but I do not care what you think you do or do not deserve. I am here regardless.” He took a deep, obvious breath through his nose, scenting Dettlaff, smelling Dettlaff’s body alive with their shared blood. “I am here.”

Dettlaff’s gaze pierced him like like claws. Regis held the gaze regardless. 

And then those hard, inaccessible eyes flickered shut, lashes falling. Some tension along his spine softened, leaning him just a little closer. 

“I missed you,” Dettlaff whispered. “I have needed you. But you should not be here.”

“Yet I _am_ ,” Regis repeated. “I am here because you are here. _Feel_ me when I say that to you.”

In his chest he felt the smallest sliver of an opening. He waited. He could not push this--force would only make Dettlaff more afraid. 

The sliver widened into a crack, and then all at once Dettlaff was _there,_ touching him, hands grasping at Regis’s neck and waist, pressing his nose into Regis’s hair and cheek and breathing him in. Dettlaff opened the way between them and let them merge once more. 

And _there it was._ At first the connection was so confusing and overwhelming that all either of them could do was shake--and then came the rush of twinned perception. Regis could smell the way he smelled to Dettlaff, how beloved that scent was to him, and knew that Dettlaff was experiencing himself through Regis’s nose in return. 

But where once Dettlaff had felt nothing but love for Regis, now all of it was polluted by dread. This fear had begun when Rhenawedd had left him and he believed her kidnapped. But now, in the wake of the blackmail, Dettlaff's fear had escalated to an all-consuming tide that racked him nearly every moment. Regis felt the miserable loneliness of the past half-year for Dettlaff, the horror of the murders, the looming terror that if he did not comply fast enough or brutally enough that his mate would be harmed. 

And there, too, was Regis’s own self-disgust. The revulsion and despair of losing himself enough to want to feed on Geralt and Eskel, of wanting to bury his mouth in Geralt’s neck and _force_ him to come apart in Regis’s arms. The wretched vulnerability of knowing that only a few sweet mouthfuls would make him destroy something precious and rare. 

But those were surface things, Regis knew. So he reached deeper inside himself to what lay below. He felt his own devotion to Dettlaff, the pangs he had borne for half a year of missing him, the warm appreciation for so many of the things that were inherently Dettlaff. And when the tide of empathy passed, all that was left was the bond. The eternal, beautiful chord that hummed between them, which Dettlaff had tried so hard to silence.

He felt Dettlaff accept it again at last.

Still weakened from the previous night’s tribulation on top of the exhaustion of his ongoing regeneration without the aid of sufficient blood, the wash of relief nearly made Regis pass out. His head spun, knees weakening so that he clutched at Dettlaff’s arms. 

“This is why I came,” Regis gasped. “I have needed this. _You_ have needed this. We are so much stronger together.”

“I have been hurting,” Dettlaff confessed, breathing it into the hair behind Regis’s left ear. 

_“We_ have been hurting,” Regis agreed. “So let us both be helped. The Witchers--”

Dettlaff stiffened at the mention of them, as Regis had known he would. He grasped his handfuls of Dettlaff’s jacket harder, anchoring him in place. And he opened himself, letting Dettlaff feel the sweetness of Geralt’s fumbling attentions, the relief and hope they enkindled in Regis. 

“You could have this too,” Regis murmured. “Eskel is yours. You know he is. You smell it in his breath, his skin, his blood. You smell it here in this room.”

The idea brought another flood of panic to their connection. The fear clenched both their bellies tight until Regis pulled Dettlaff’s attention back to the way _Geralt_ made him feel. The delight, the pleasure, the newness of it. The growth of their connection over time. 

“You could have this too,” Regis repeated.

“But I’m no good at this!” Dettlaff admitted. “Mortals are beyond me. I will hurt him too somehow. You think Rhena left me, I _know_ you do. And if you are right, then whatever I did wrong with her I will do again and drive _him_ away too. And if the blackmailers discover that he is mine--the world hates Witchers, if they can do this to Rhena then what they would do to him--I cannot bear it again--”

“That is not happening now,” Regis soothed. “You have every reason to be afraid. Rhenawedd has been gone so long and now she is in danger. So I beg you, let all three of us help you with this. They are both canny--clever, insightful, with skills and knowledge even we lack.”

“I cannot bear it again,” Dettlaff repeated. “If I let myself see him and then something happens to him too...”

Regis had been a surgeon long enough to see that trying to pull Dettlaff’s mind away from this fear was like trying to distract a human from a gaping wound in their body. The human might try to distract theirself, but humans were not designed to be able to forget such things. Just as Vampires were not designed to forget threats to their mates.

“Then I will still be here, and we will still be stronger side by side,” Regis said, because it was true. “And if _nothing_ happens to him, and he is yours and you never meet him, then you both lose.”

For several long moments they simply stood breathing in the scent of each other. Quiet tenderness bloomed at the edges of their connection as it always did. If Dettlaff would just give it time...

“Would he welcome me, do you think?” Dettlaff asked. 

Regis had wondered what he would say when it came to this. Now that they were both here, he found that he knew. 

“You remember how it was with that garkain you found two years ago--the one that bit you and screamed at you because it was injured and afraid?”

Dettlaff nodded. 

“Eskel may do the human equivalent of that. He is a Witcher trained to fear monsters, so he may be cruel or confusing. He may want your presence one day and hate it the next. I can make no promises of what he will be like at first. But even within a few days he has softened to me. We may both need to be patient.”

“Just being near him would be...” Dettlaff began, and then lost his words.

Sadness filled Regis at this. He wanted more for Dettlaff than just loving Eskel from afar. But Regis understood resigning oneself to taking whatever one could get, too. It was how Regis had been prepared to behave with Geralt until Geralt had thrown himself at the situation head-first, with far more eagerness than Regis had ever thought he could expect. 

“Even when you were closed to me, you’re such a part of me that I could smell that he was your mate from the moment I met him,” Regis admitted, smiling about it now. “He is so much your mate that sometimes even _I_ feel drawn to him. So come meet him. Put me out of my misery.”

Dettlaff smiled. 

Regis was willing to bet that Dettlaff had not smiled more than a handful of times in the whole half-year they’d been separated. Right now it was still toothy and inhuman because he was so overwhelmed, but he was smiling nonetheless.


End file.
